


Western Decadence

by Lsusanna



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: BAMF Natasha Romanov, BAMF Phil Coulson, Brainwashing, Clint Is a Good Bro, Clint loves Disney, Communism, Disney has magical powers, F/M, Genderbending, Genderswap, Healing, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Natasha-centric, POV Second Person, Past Brainwashing, Red Room, Rule 63, Rule 63 Clint, Rule 63 Coulson, Rule 63 Natasha, SHIELD, genderbent, the Red Room tried to recreate the USSR okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-02
Updated: 2015-01-02
Packaged: 2018-03-04 20:46:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3088751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lsusanna/pseuds/Lsusanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are the Black Widow, perfect and empty. You are sent to Leipzig to terminate a man named Drakov. You are in position. You are unprepared for his daughter skipping out of the building after him. You are unprepared for the reaction you have to this. You are unprepared for the slip, the click. </p><p>The Black Widow does not disobey orders, but you do. The Red Room sends people after you. You run. You know that SHIELD's been trying to catch up to you, so when an American archer finds you in a warehouse in Budapest, injured and tired and confused, you think, better SHIELD than the Room. </p><p>You're unprepared for what happens next.</p><p>****** </p><p>The story of Alexi Romanov (Rule 63 Natasha), up through CA:TWS</p>
            </blockquote>





	Western Decadence

**Author's Note:**

> Romanov, Barton, and Coulson are the only ones Rule 63'd here.
> 
> I wrote this with Clintasha in mind, but it reads as platonic.

You are led through a compound of some kind, you think, but you can’t really know, because they put a hood over your head before they led you off the jet. Your hands are bound behind you, your steps stilted for the chain that dips between your ankles, and you can hear the footfalls of the entourage that is assembled around you. It feels vaguely like a production. But then, SHIELD has always been cloak-and-dagger, their leather-coated pirate leading them in their country’s same propensity for theatrics.

 

Not that it’s for you to say, and not that the blunt efficiency you’re used to is better, and not to say you really care.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

The first person you see, strapped down in a chair in an interrogation room, is Coulson, whom you know only secondhand, as Barton mentioned her. She seems angry, which you suppose she has the right to be, because you’ve taken out agents of SHIELD before; or, as she puts it, you’ve killed many a good man. You can sense how formidable she is, if she has hiding it behind her professional blandness down to a science.

 

She discusses the choice Barton gave you; if you both take into account the subtleties and complications.

 

Those subtleties and complications haven’t been lost on you, and you never assumed to escape them because you pulled at the heart of a lower-level sniper. But you do have things SHIELD wants, and you suggest making a deal.

 

Coulson tells you she can’t guarantee Barton’s promise being delivered. You say that you don’t care, and you really don’t. But you won’t go back. You tell Coulson as much. You don’t care what SHIELD does to you, so long as it’s SHIELD doing it. You _won’t_ go back to the Red Room. You know you’re in no place to threaten anyone, but you look at Coulson as if you are, and you _are_ the Black Widow, after all, you’re sure you can figure something out.

 

You _won’t_ go back. It’s really the only thing that gets a rise out of you. It’s the only statement you’ve made so far that could tell of the images swimming behind your eyes, stabbing at your mind. That could suggest that you really are about as far from being in control as anyone could be. The only statement you’ve made that could suggest you don’t know who you are, and are afraid of the people who are in fact not your employers, but captors.

 

You think Coulson sees this. You’ve had the notion that she came in here to make an assessment of you; whether to corroborate Barton’s impression or for something else, you don’t know. You understand that letting these things slip through your meticulously maintained mask is a weakness in and of itself, forget how you’re making yourself seem to SHIELD. But you don’t care, because you will not go back.

 

Coulson asks you, how you expect the Red Room to find you, deep within the clandestine custody of SHIELD.

 

Your lips twist into what might have been considered a smile, somewhere on this earth.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You know Fury is only keeping you alive because he’s salivating to get at the Red Room. You know once your uses are no longer usable, you’re expendable. It’s no different than what you’re used to.

 

Fury only wants the Room, and you don’t care what happens to you, so long as SHIELD doesn’t let them take you back, but here’s the catch:

 

Nothing you say can be acted upon or believed. Not because you could be manipulating SHIELD, here on a mission of infiltration, but because the things you yourself believe could be lies. Probably are. And so, to make good on your deal, and give Fury his goal, you are handed over to the Psychiatric Division. The Red Room’s influence is to be removed from your mind.

 

You’re about as happy about this plot twist as Fury is.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

At least a part of Barton’s promise is kept, quite by chance. Psych sticks their grubby fingers in your mind, and you let them. You… _cooperate_. You cooperate, and you give them what they want, but you don’t give them the satisfaction of taking your pride. It’s one of the few things you have left, dictating how and when you break, and you hold onto it like a vise. Pride is one of the few definitions of who you really are that you have, and you aren’t about to _cooperate_ , not in that way.

 

The things you tell them you’ve done, the missions and assassinations, are, in a detached, professional sense, admirable; and, in a human sense, despicable. You don’t seem to take pride in them, but you don’t look like you feel guilty about them, and the apathy isn’t a lie, but it isn’t your conditioning either.

 

The things you tell them have been done to you by the Room are atrocities. You know that. You don’t dilute yourself with believing otherwise. You know that, however much a villain you may be, you are in actuality a victim, at least in origin, and you know that the Red Room is a monster of a thing.

 

They surmise you are about seventeen, and they figure out you were taken at maybe age four. They ask if you remember being taken, and you say yes. You tell them what little you remember about the fire. You tell them what little you remember about your training.

 

(It is maybe worth mentioning that you tell it all in perfect English, accent American. One of the doctors is from Boston, which is painfully obvious to hear, and you have to consciously stop yourself from slipping into the same accent, because you aren’t blending in, now, and doing so will only seem a weakness.)

 

Your enhancements become relevant, and you’re poked and prodded and studied, which bothers you a little, for the same reasons the technicians are bothered: they fear the reaction the needles will trigger for you, and they fear how well you could turn the apparatuses against them. (It may be worth mentioning that you don’t care overmuch about the latter.) But it bothers you, also, because you don’t trust Fury with the knowledge. You don’t know how young SHIELD recruits, and you don’t know the lengths they go to, or the lengths some of the shadier parts of such a large organization will go to. And you remember how damn _much_ it _hurt_ , to be injected with the stuff. Like fire in your veins, ripping bits of you along with it as it raced through you. (You remember once, you might have been eight, and the serum was bleeding-edge at the time. You started bleeding after a treatment, from your mouth and nose, and you remember wanting to and trying to scream, but you ended up choking on the blood. This memory bothers you, but they all do.)

 

You know the things that were done to you are atrocities, but you also don’t give them the satisfaction of seeming bothered by the experiences.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

But you are.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You are very bothered.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You’ve been assessing possible stratagems since you got here. You could seem as cold and aloof as the Black Widow SHIELD first starting chasing. You could practice nothingness, uncooperative nothingness. You could be as one of the sanguinary agents you used to know in passing, sadistic and cruel. You could make it so SHIELD would be forced to torture each syllable from you. You could make it so even Barton and Coulson are disgusted with you.

 

Or, you could be a pitiful, broken shell of a thing, ripped apart by your childhood, tortured by the guilt of your career. You could be a weak little thing, and play upon the emotions of them all.

 

And, if you did, you could lie. You could be the Black Widow. You could drown them all in semantics. You could pretend to respond to Psych’s ministrations, grateful and cooperative, and then you could make good on your deal, and give information, and send whichever team is sent to their deaths.

 

You could do it all, and you could likely succeed. But you don’t. If you wanted to be the Black Widow, you would have killed Barton in Budapest. You would have gone back to the Room after the Process slipped in Leipzig. You would have continued to pursue Drakov, after you were unable to take your shot.

 

But you did none of it, and so here you are. You cooperate. But pride is only part of why you have no real responses. Oh, you realize you should be playing the game, at least a little bit, because you know you aren’t endearing yourself to anyone. Barton came to see you, once, and she said that she and Coulson were still trying to make it so that you wouldn’t be thrown into a hole somewhere after you were no longer useful. Or, at least, they were trying to make it a nice hole. And so you know that, despite your own deal, Barton and the promise you agreed to are still a possibility. And you know that is why you should be endearing yourself to at least someone.

 

But you don’t. Because, you’ve realized, your apathy isn’t a lie. You just don’t fucking _care_.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You’re cuffed to a chair, in a poorly lit room, where the long conversations with your Psych doctor, Levine, of Boston, take place. Something feels off, though, and when Levine comes in something’s off about him. You’re immediately suspicious, you’re immediately envisioning possible outs you can find, and then he tells you, they triggered something, when they dove in for that last session. He tells you, you spent the last four days thinking you were someone named Yulian Belov.

 

There is something of a sinking feeling in your abdomen.

 

Levine asks who Yulian Belov is. You tell him mildly he was a cover.  You don’t know why you bother; you’ve obviously just blown whatever impartial strength you’ve managed to assemble about yourself.

 

Levine asks you why you thought you were one of your covers. You sigh, softly, out your nose, and you tell him about Yulian Belov.

 

You tell him it began as a cover, like the others. You tell him that the Room decided it wanted to assassinate Mikhail Shostakov, a diplomat, but only after information was gleaned from him. The Room wanted to leave nothing to chance, no room for error, and so you were, for lack of a better term, made to believe you were Yulian Belov. They brainwashed you to believe you were the Black Widow, and then they brainwashed you to forget. And so, it was a dancer from Saint Petersburg, in Moscow with the Bolshoi Ballet, who met and married Ana Shostakova, and who subsequently quit to work for her father and embroil himself in politics. But the Black Widow was there, somewhere, somehow, and so when the mission was completed, you resurfaced, and killed Shostakov, his daughter, and an unlucky maid.

 

Levine nods; clicks open his pen, and writes it down. He asks, if you were given any other false identities. You decide you don’t necessarily like Levine. But the only reason might be because you have to say yes.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

The apathy isn’t a lie. You realize, you’re as cold as the winters you hail from. But there is a part of you, under it all, that burns with the things you see through your mind’s eye. You are bothered by who you are.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

The deeper Psych delves, the more effort is required for you to keep up your front. You don’t like this. You don’t like how confused you seem. You don’t like how confused you _are_. You say ‘um’ more than you’d like. The questions Levine asks become harder to answer. You realize that, though the path you’ve been one has been hard to navigate and strewn with obstacles, it’s been level, and you’ve only just begun to climb.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You become well acquainted with the intricacies of reversing programming. You don’t like to think of yourself as a machine, but SHIELD has no use for you as an asset, and you don’t know how to think of yourself as a person, and you won’t think of yourself as a victim, and so you suppose machine is best.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

They finish eventually. You don’t see Levine again. You tell a woman named Hill everything you know about the Red Room, in one shot, one long interrogation. She comes back, sporadically, to ask questions about blueprints or key players, and you suppose that means the war on the Room has begun in earnest, and SHIELD at times need extra information.

 

They finish with this too, eventually, and with it, they finish with you. You are moved to a cell, a temporary one you think, with no light besides that which comes under the door, nothing in it but four walls and a concrete floor. You suppose this is your purgatory, if you haven’t been in that all along. You suppose this is your in-between place, before they find you a suitable prison, a permanent one. 

 

This doesn’t faze you. You don’t care. You suppose, also, that this means Levine will truly never bother you again. You suppose SHIELD will finally leave you be. You suppose you’ve reached and end. This doesn’t faze you. You’ve been sitting in a corner of your little box, the furthest of the four from the door, knees drawn up loosely to your chest. You’ve been sitting calmly. You get it in your head to start screaming, you don’t know why, and you keep doing it, raw and loud, until someone starts piping something through the air vents, they must be, because you start to lose consciousness.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

When you wake, you don’t feel any better for the screaming, but you do feel more brittle. You sit up to assess your surroundings.

 

You’re on a metal slab of a cot with no legs that’s bolted to the wall. You notice the edges are rounded. Which is fine, because you weren’t planning on killing yourself anyway, but it does bother you that now you _can’t_. (Which isn’t true. You still could, just as you were still a danger to Levine and the others, even without weapons. The Black Widow has never needed anything but his hands. You suppose what really bothers you is that SHIELD is _trying_ to stop you.) You move on to the room. The cot is the only thing in it, except for a toilet situated against the far corner. You notice there is no door, either, which _bothers_ you for a few moments, until you realize that they had to get you in here, somehow, and so it’s probably hidden. You have a feeling you’re underground.

 

You think for a moment that this might be your promised hole, but then you see a number and letter painted on the wall across from you, high in a corner near the ceiling. SHIELD numbers all its cells alphanumerically, you’ve noticed. And all the rooms you’ve been in have all ended in A, and you’ve thought that that letter must be specific to this building, and so you surmise this isn’t your new home, because you’ve heard it said that you would be shipped off somewhere else, when it came time for your imprisonment. You suppose you’re in for a bit more waiting.

 

Therefore, you bring your legs up to sit cross-legged on your cot, and do just that.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You wait for a long time. You don’t know how long exactly, because the yellow light set high in the ceiling never shuts off, but you have a pretty good internal clock, and you think it’s been days.

 

You wait for a bit longer, wondering what the delay is, and you have a horrible moment of wondering if SHIELD will send you back to the Room, but you dismiss the thought as the irrationalities of fear. You stop waiting, though, because you still don’t care. Here or somewhere else, what does it matter?

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You spend a very long time not caring, lying on your cot. You sleep, sometimes. But mostly you just lie there, despite how _tired_ you are, because you don’t like what you see when you sleep. You feel very hollow, despite the knowledge that you’re extremely full.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You watch from your cot as a small portion of the concrete wall near the floor pulls away, and a cheeseburger and a glass of water is pushed through the hole on a small metal slab. (Rounded edges.) You watch it for a moment, a listless examination. _Western decadence_ , you think, and then you roll over and close your eyes.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You wonder what would happen if you ignored the world. The edges of your cot were filed down, sure, but maybe that’s because SHIELD doesn’t want to clean up the mess of the life-liquid that runs through your veins. Maybe if you just wasted away, no one would care. Maybe no one would stop you.

 

You don’t try it, but you don’t not. You just keep on not caring.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You don’t mean it to be a conscious decision, or a momentous declaration to live, but you do eventually stop ignoring the meals they bring you.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You spend a lot of time wishing they’d given you a blanket. Wishing they could. Wishing you couldn’t weaponize one of they did. Wishing you hadn’t been taught how.

 

You spend a lot of time feeling lost and small and broken. It’s a weakness. You don’t like it.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Eventually, you start thinking again, about why they’re waiting. You wonder if they’re making an assessment of some kind.

 

You only met Fury once, but he struck you as ruthless. And if he is watching you, then it can only mean _something_. You wonder if it’s your serum SHIELD wants. Or the specifics of the Room’s Process, so they can recreate it and make perfect assassins of their own; or, so they can put the Back Widow back in the field, vicious and perfect and empty, doing SHIELD’s—or Fury’s—dirty work from behind the shadows.

 

You don’t know what they’re waiting for, but it’s a game, and you’re determined to win. You’re determined to be prepared for whatever is to come. You realize, you’ve gone soft, in body and mind.

 

You fill your hours with every exercise you’ve learned to do in such an enclosed space. Your serum never put you on the level Erskine’s original did for Captain America, in strength, speed, or anything else, but you are classified as superhuman, and so it takes very little time for you to get back to the condition you were in before SHIELD caught up with you.

 

And as for the mental, you practice nothingness.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You train, and you practice nothingness, but you know you’re lying to yourself. You know the initial spurt of energy has evaporated. You still can’t find it in you to care. Work past the numbness. But there is a feeling under the apathy, or feelings, and you can’t name them, but you know they’re there. You don’t have introspection in you, not yet, and so you don’t know what’s going on under the surface. It bothers you. It’s a weakness.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You attack the walls. When you’re done, you sit cross-legged on you cot, your hands mutilated and their blood pooling onto the metal, and you bash your head back against the wall, repeatedly, methodically. When you’re finished with that, you crawl off the cot and lie face-down on the floor, and you wish the space was smaller and more enclosed. You don’t feel safe.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

The pools of blood seeping away from you must have gotten too large, or maybe SHIELD has that elusive capacity for kindness, because when you wake, your hands and the back of your head are lined with sutures.

 

You give it several hours or so to heal, and then you peel the stitches out of your hands. Slowly, methodically. You may have overestimated your serum, because you start to bleed again, but it isn’t so bad, and it made you feel like a living, breathing organism again, so you leave it be.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Perhaps a few days later, you do much the same, lying face-down on your cot. You smash you face down onto the metal, over and over, till blood starts welling out of your nose. It’s topical, and so you don’t care, and you just roll over and eventually find sleep.

 

You dream of monsters. And when you wake—or rather, _try_ to wake—they’re actually there, and it freaks you out, and you strain against whatever force holds you in place until you win, and you shoot up and eventually collide with the wall across from your cot. You stand there, panting, pressed against the concrete under the 34A painted on the wall.

 

Levine had called it sleep paralysis. You call it a hell. You call it a weakness. You hate it.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You realize you’re bored. The knowledge hits you like a slap, and it’s such a _juvenile_ feeling, and you hate it. You dismiss it, and resolve to ignore further iterations of it.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You fail. And the remaining sedentary, and the apathy, and the anger simmering somewhere inside, and the being underground and the lack of any doors—it gets to you, and you hit your head against the walls again. Above your right temple this time. The blood gets in your eye. It’s annoying.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

The wall slides into itself, one day, revealing the missing door. (Theatrics, always, with these people.) Coulson is standing there, accompanied by a handful of guards. She puts elaborate handcuffs on you; a metal apparatus that encases most of your forearms, rather like a muff. A hood is pulled over your head and you’re led down hallways, and you memorize the turns you take and the sounds you hear, because you have an irrational sense of fear despite how even you keep your breathing and heartbeat, despite the look of almost _niceness_ that had been on Coulson’s face. You hear doors open, and you assess the possible courses of action you could take, and you think you could take the guards and Coulson, but getting out of the compound would be another matter entirely. And there’s probably a locator in the muff you don’t think you could take off anyway, if not a needle that would pop out and inject your arm with either a sedative or something to kill you, and—

 

The hood is pulled off your face, and you squint, despite yourself. You haven’t seen sunlight in a long while.

 

“We thought you might be getting stir-crazy,” Coulson says. “You have thirty minutes.” She leaves, then, and you’re left alone with the guards that stand at attention around the industrial courtyard you find yourself in.

 

You wonder why they’ve done this, and then you have a moment of a rather calm feeling, and you like it. But then you remember that you don’t actually know the fate of the Red Room, and you know they’re capable of having a sniper get to you, here in this exposed position, so you retreat under the lip of the roof and sink to the floor.

 

You sit there for the whole thirty minutes, watching the sky, breathing the air. From the color of the sky and the crisp bite to the air, you surmise it must be winter. It surprises you that you’ve been here for a whole year, because it was spring when you were sent to Leipzig, but then of course it couldn’t be winter when you broke free of the Red Room. You suppose you’re about eighteen now, give or take. You wonder why the Room decided to take you, when you know that they recruit mostly from orphanages.

 

About forty seconds before your thirty minutes are up, you stand and make your way to stand next to the door. It’ll snow. You can smell it on the air. 

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You make no move to get up from your cot as the wall slides away and reveals Director Fury. He enters the cell, and watches you for a long moment. You stare back. It registers that no matter how well you play this, he’s still seen you punching walls and waking up with the carvings your demons left still etched over your face. But if you’re nothing else, you’re a proud son of a bitch. It’s one of the few things you know about your personality.

 

“I hope you know how much of a nuisance Coulson’s made of herself on your behalf,” Fury says, as if it’s something you should answer for. For the first time in a long time, you remember Barton’s promise. You’ve never put much stock in it.

 

The lack of professionalism in such a statement, and in the occurrence behind it, is new to you, but then again, this is SHIELD.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Psych took the Process from your mind, and you’re able to follow your own commands. But they did it to a prisoner, an enemy assassin, so they could get the information SHIELD needed. They needed to rid the world of a greater evil than yourself, and that is the only reason you were able to make your deal, or give Coulson and Barton the time they needed to secure their promise.

 

Their process was one of breaking and re-breaking, to make sense of the jumbled memories, your cover’s memories, memories that were put in place as a contingency plan. Memories of waltzes you know by heart and can move to. You retain your skills, but remember how they were obtained. Remember how you got your serum. Remember the fire. Their process was one of breaking and re-breaking, but the end result wasn’t to leave you whole. It was necessary to leave you sane; Levine couldn’t just pull away your conditioning and leave you a shambles, because you needed to give coherent answers. But that was it. They weren’t healing a human, they were modifying a weapon.

 

And so you still can’t function like a normal person. You’ve been warned you may never, and you know you won’t, but there are things that are done to improve your mental state. You spend more months with Psych.

 

You hate it.

 

There are differences, though. When Levine is finished, you are led to a compartment; separate from the living quarters of agents of SHIELD, but not a cell, so you can’t complain. You aren’t free, but you aren’t a prisoner. You have a bed, and a bookshelf, and when you have enough freedom to get it, you have money stashed in several accounts, mostly in Europe and North America.

 

But the most notable difference is Barton. She’s always there, except when you sleep or are with Psych. You know she’s your babysitter, which irks you, a bit. You realize, you’re a complicated little mess. And you know it’s Barton who’s watching you because you are, technically, her mess.

 

But you also know that she was the one to see the ghost under the machine, the one to give you a chance, and you know after just a few days of observation she’s exceptionally good, despite being in this business. (Or maybe she’s just too new to be touched much by it.) And so, you know that she isn’t the type to just offer a chance to switch sides; she believes in life, not just business, and so you suppose that’s why she keeps trying to be what you assume is a friend.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Clair walks out onto the roof of SHIELD’s New York base. She wears the basic winter clothing; fur-tipped boots pulled over fluffy-socked feet and plain purple pajama bottoms, an insulated coat blearily pushed on top of a sanctioned grey SHIELD t-shirt, and a yellow Hawkeyes ski cap pulled over her ears, complete with pom-pom-ed tassels.

 

She still, however, feels the need to wrap her brown and red fleece blanket around her shoulders to ward off the cold.

 

Clair Barton hates the cold.

 

However, she continues on, scuffing along the roof in search of the Russian agent who had for some reason not been asleep at two o’clock in the damned morning, like a sane, normal person who valued the precious commodity that was sleep. Like, One Ring-type precious.

 

The only reason she’s bothering is because Phil would have her head and Fury would have her ass if Romanov does something stupid.

 

To Clair, his being on the roof, at night, depressed, is beginning to smell stupid.

 

Clair rounds a bend in the rooftop path created by various large canisters, not stopping to wonder about what function they serve, and catches sight of the man who is her target yet again.

 

Romanov is lying on the part of the roof sheltered from cameras; Clair knows this, because when she first came to SHIELD, she had gone searching for a sheltered place herself. She had found this one, a few patches of air-vent, and a bit of rafter-space. There are others, but not much to her liking. Her attention turns back to Romanov. He looks like he had been sitting cross-legged, and had just laid back, his legs staying bent. His arms are crossed over his chest, and he looks up at the night sky.

 

 _He_ , of course, wears nothing but the standard SHIELD-provided clothing out in the winter cold, black sweatpants and long sleeved grey shirt, as well as socks that Clair notes—for no apparent purpose—are plain, not fluffy.

 

Romanov lifts his head and turns it to look at her, and Clair isn’t surprised he knows she’s there. He’s smiling; not so much in the lips, which are barely turned up, but in the face. The eyes.

 

“What are you doing out here?” Clair asks, voice slightly hoarse, trudging over to plop down next to her charge.

 

“Snow,” he says, as if it’s obvious. His voice is sure of itself, and satisfied; that last being a first.

 

“Beg pardon?” Clair replies, leaning back against a tall, wide canister that may or may not have something to do with air conditioning, re-wrapping her blanket around her.

 

“It’s going to snow.”

 

Clair squints up at the sky. “The weather report said it wouldn’t.”

 

“It’s going to snow,” Romanov repeats, inflection growing on the ‘it’s’, not-smile widening around the cheekbones. “I can smell it.”

 

“Yes sir, Mr. Weatherman,” Clair sighs, unconvinced, pulling gloves out of her coat pocket, shoving them on. She pauses with one glove half-on, the other already snug around her palm. She turns to Romanov incredulously. “You can _smell_ snow?”

 

The spy uncrosses his arms to pull himself up to lean on the canister, legs still staying crossed, pulling his gaze from the sky. He regards her for a moment, a never-before-seen spark in his eyes, before turning away again. As he does, Clair catches a wisp of a wicked smirk on his lips; so fleeting, she almost misses it. Romanov’s one for micro-expressions.

 

Clair examines the sky again, seeing no trace of snow. It’s mid-January, the snow’s a bit late this year, but there’s still no sign it’ll come anytime soon.

 

She glances at Romanov. There’s something strange about this scene. It’s…comfortable. Romanov’s comfortable. There’s no brooding, no issues. No walls. Just…contentment. And, apparently, impending snow.

 

A gust of wind whistles around some pipes and to them, tousling their hair and making Clair shiver, although Romanov seems to enjoy the feeling. She hunkers deeper into her blanket, casting Romanov an almost disgusted look. Clair Barton _really_ hates the cold.

 

“Damn, man, aren’t you cold?” she asks.

 

“I actually like it. But… Yes.” Romanov replies, lightly, but sinking a little bit at that last; the smelling snow thing—that’s just Lorelai Gilmore, but the ability to ignore cold…that’s the Room.

 

Clair decides not to put weight on it, and skips over it. “…So…you’re just going to sit out here…and wait for frozen water…to fall from the sky.” Clair says, quite and yet not quite a question.

 

“Yes,” says Romanov.

 

“…Snow that you can smell.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“…At two in the morning?”

 

“Mm-hmm.”

 

Clair sighs, and hunkers down for the long haul. “Well, then I gotta wait her with you.”

 

“You know, you don’t,” Romanov says, lifting his head off the canister to look at her. The satisfied expression fades somewhat, and Clair gets the impression that he would go back in with her if she asked. He isn’t really one for insistence on pleasurable activities.

 

“Yea, I do. I’m intrigued, now, Romanov; I want to see if it’s possible to smell snow.” Her voice lowers to a mutter; “Idiot.”

 

Clair squints back up at the sky, face screwed up in concentration, through peripheral vision seeing Romanov’s chest jump in a soft snort.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

“It’s not going to snow,” Clair says suddenly.

 

“It’s going to snow,” Romanov intones, head bobbing a bit self-assuredly.

 

“Y- wha- you cannot smell snow!” Clair splutters.

 

“It’s going to snow.” Romanov turns his face to the stars, head leaning back to the canister.

 

Clair sighs. A _sigh_ kind of sigh.

 

A few moments pass.

 

Clair unfolds her legs a bit, cramping slightly but unwilling to leave the safety of her blanket. She plays with one of her hat’s tassels absently. She doesn’t have a clock, but she thinks it’s probably about three-thirty. “You know, you’d think you wouldn’t like snow,” Clair muses. There’s no agenda behind the question, no prying or malice; just a wondering.

 

Romanov shrugs and responds in kind. “I don’t really remember…snow. There was ice, and that semi-packed stuff that squeaks under your shoes, and the sludge you have to wade through. Some hail, a few blizzards. A lot of blizzards.” His eyes squint a bit. “There was one training exercise, around Yakutsk. There was this…wall of snow. It went on for a while, about three miles long; don’t know how wide. Taller than I was. It was that packed kind, but not hard enough to keep you from falling in it. Had to go across the three miles without snow-shoes.” There’s nothing behind his words either; just sharing.

 

“Training exercise?” Clair asks, curious, picturing Boromir burrowing through snow on Caradhras.

 

“I had to make it from a designated drop-point near Yakutsk to an outpost close to Aldan.” Romanov pauses. “SHIELD got that base, I think.”

 

“Huh,” Clair muses.

 

“Mm-hmm. Anyway, there was never… _snow_. You know, the pleasant, powdery stuff. A first snow. Just…falling flakes. Snow.”

 

Romanov lapses back into silence, and Clair assumes the sharing’s over; there had been too much already to fit with Romanov’s usual personality.    

 

She looks up, considering snow.

 

“It’s…free,” Romanov whispers, bringing Clair back to earth. “Snow. No one can make it come or go. Well, except God. It doesn’t hurt anything—not the flaks, anyway. It’s delicate. Like…music. It does what it wants.” Romanov seems surprised by himself, then; he takes his eyes from the sky and contemplates the floor for a moment. “I don’t really know what I meant by that.”

 

“No,” Clair says softly. “I…I think I get it.”

 

There’s silence for a while.

 

“Hey, Alexi?” Clair asks softly, his first name strange on her tongue but coming easily.

 

He looks toward her.

 

“Do you like it…here?”

 

Romanov considers for a moment. He speaks again, and this time, he looks at her when he does. “It’s better than there. A l— …A lot better.”

 

 “No, but I mean…here.”

 

“It’s…okay.” Romanov says. “The being watched makes the building smaller. Hence the roof.”

 

“…You could leave,” Clair suggests.

 

“What?” Romanov asks, brows coming together.

 

“No—I mean, the building.”

 

His face says something apprehensive.

 

“I think you could be okay. You have to eventually.” Clair smiles. “And Rockefeller Center is nice this time of year. You ever been ice skating?”

 

“…Not recreationally, but I possess the skill,” Romanov replies, in true Romanov fashion.

 

“It’s nice. You should try it. We could go…tomorrow…if you want.”

 

“Okay,” Romanov replies softly.

 

Clair nods. “Alexi?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“…I like you,” Clare states bluntly and with a sense of decided finality.

 

“I’m thrilled,” Alexi replies, mouth quirking in a one-sided smirk.

 

“No! Really. I’m serious,” Clair defends herself, sitting straighter.

 

Alexi’s face straightens. It holds something of a question, something of gratitude, something of a want. Something of a hesitation, as if the aforementioned is undeserved.

 

“You’re not so bad yourself,” he says slowly, a lopsided smile slowly coming to life, again more in the face than the lips.

 

The moment levels out, and their attention is once more turned to the sky.

 

Clair snuggles into the cocoon of her blanket, pouting darkly. “Frikin’ four o’clock in the frikin’ morning frikin’ waiting for the frikin’ snow.”

 

Alexi chuckles softly.

 

“Can’t smell frikin’ snow, man!” Clair yells, her yellow tassels flying wildly.

 

His chuckle morphs into a laugh, which is surprisingly nice-sounding.

 

Things calm, Clair calms, and they resume their wait.

 

Clair glances at Alexi, letting the look linger when she sees him looking up at the sky, smiling. Not darkly, not sarcastically, not fake, not mostly in the expression—a real smile. Full, satisfied, happy; strange, on him, but a long time coming—deserved.

 

…Free. Like his snow.

 

 

Clair watches as a few fat flakes lodge themselves in scarlet hair and thick lashes, and only then realizes their wait is over. She looks around them, at the white puffs spiraling silently down on the roof, the canisters; she looks up to see them rushing to meet her, colliding with her exposed face like feather-light frozen kisses, and realizes she doesn’t mind the cold so much.

 

She glances back at Alexi, and finds him basking in the snow, his sleep-spiked hair littered with it, like powdered sugar on red velvet cake. For the first time since she’s met him, about two years ago, he looks his age.

 

His eyes are closed. It’s not lost on Clair how much trust it takes for him to do so out in the open like this, on the roof, no one watching his back. It dawns on her that she is. That he’s letting her, the trust directed at her.

 

She looks back up and pulls off her ski cap, letting the snow salt her hair, wearing a satisfied, contented smile of her own.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You’re given a final evaluation by Psych. SHIELD’s training division assesses you and your skills. You’re slowly integrated into SHIELD. You’re given a job.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You are, technically, classified as superhuman. This is why you can accurately aim both your guns at once, and why you can, under optimal conditions, dodge a bullet point-blank. It’s why you must pull your punches when you spar with Barton. It’s why you can hear her naturally quiet footfalls well before she reaches your compartment.

 

You are good at what you do. Some have called you the best. You are proficient in varied types of martial arts. You can withstand hours, perhaps days, of intense, physically horrific, and pathological torture. You speak more than a dozen languages, most of those fluently, and can adjust for the slang, idioms, and accents of different regions or classes. You can accurately draw a map of the world, both physical and political. You can accurately discuss politics, world history, the differences between cabernet and merlot, classic literature, and most intellectually important current events. You can seduce most people—of both genders—and have, in a variety of the afore-mentioned languages, because you can read people; very, very well. And since you can, you can lie, and manipulate—very, very well.

 

You were recruited at age four, were given your serum only a few years later, have been in the field since preadolescence, and are the only survivor of the Black Widow Program. You _are_ the Black Widow.

 

But you’re relearning life.

 

You admit you don’t know how to handle mercy.

 

When Barton gapes at you because you don’t know what Disney is beyond an academic sense, you let her sit you down with gummy bears and Doritos to marathon watch animated films. You watch something called Tangled, and when you tell her that in the original story, the prince went blind and Rapunzel was banished into wilderness, Barton replies that some things are nice to have nice, sometimes. You suppose there’s a deep truth to that.

 

You slowly start to accumulate books, and on that shelf of yours, along with the Star Trek lamp Clair gave you, they make your compartment look less clinical. It’s mostly Eastern-European literature, spattered with Dickens and the Bronte sisters, and one Victor Hugo. You discover George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Vasily Grossman, and _Darkness at Noon_. You devour the books like fire set upon the dry pages, a tight feeling in your throat, and you have to consciously remind yourself that you won’t be punished if you’re discovered reading them; that you don’t have to hide the fact that you are. You find _The Hunger Games_ , and you see the same displeased message peppered throughout the text, which doesn’t exactly surprise you, because you’ve had your doubts about America’s own society. You don’t know when Clair started calling you Lex, but when you counter one day with Katniss, she throws and M&M at your head.

 

You relearn field work, too, of which you thought you knew all there was to know. It turns out to be that same question of mercy. You learn to watch Clair’s back in the field, as well as your own, which is new, because you’ve only every worked alone. You stop finding anything wrong with leaving witnesses alive, or taking a more circuitous route to complete an objective, so as to minimize civilian casualties.

 

It takes a bit longer to stop pursuing your assignment objectives with what Coulson calls self-destructive tenacity, and you call efficiency. She tells you that jumping out of a building and breaking multiple bones isn’t efficient. You tell her, respectfully, that it is, if you got back up and secured the package. Coulson always sighs, after these conversations.

 

You’re used to just being set loose for missions and then returning when they’re completed, and so you learn to function with comms, and give Coulson, who waits back at base, something of a play-by-play; though you still find it unnecessary when she asks for updates on your injuries, and you think that ‘operational’ should be a perfectly acceptable answer.

 

You’re in the bathroom of a club, on one occasion, with a mark, who’s selling a device SHIELD wants. He has you between himself and a grimy wall, pressing drunk kisses over your neck, which is fine, because he’s supposed to have the device in his jacket, and you can knock him out before things go too far. Except he doesn’t have the device on him. You can’t risk blowing your cover as his chauffeur yet, not with the device still out there, so you’re resigning yourself to having to go through with things when Clair comes up from behind and hits him over the head with a porcelain soap dish. 

 

The assignment goes all to hell, after that, and you expect punishment from Coulson when it’s over, but none comes. You realize, she cares about her charges, on a personal level, for all the pains she takes to hide it. You realize why Fury chose Hill as the Deputy Director over her. You realize that, while SHIELD’s apathy is of a lesser caliber than what you’re used to, it’s still doesn’t practice the caring Coulson does. You realize you’ve managed to stumble upon some of the most human people SHIELD has on staff. Which you really should have known by now, seeing as Clair and Phil were the ones to rescue you in the first place.

 

You learn to know Strike Team Delta. You learn to put yourself first, sometimes, second only to those you care about, and the greater good.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You learn to know the Avengers.

 

Stark forgives you, you forgive Stark, and then Banner. Rogers and Stark learn to function with each other. Thor stops looking at Clair like he will owe her a debt for all eternity. Clair stops wearing an angrier version of her resting face. You stop feeling the need to position your thumbs over Loki’s eye sockets and apply pressure. Both you and she stop consciously feeling Coulson’s absence, and get used to Hill being your handler.

 

You all learn to function. You all learn who’s usually out first during the drinking games. None of you says a word when Rogers, Clair, and Thor make popcorn, Stark absorbs himself in his holograms with Banner, and you stare at the carpet and use your training to tune out the Ohana scene in Lilo and Stitch.

 

The Avengers become a family unit of sorts.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

They still think you’re human.

 

That thought whispers itself through your mind like poison at the most inopportune times. It’s not wrong.

 

They assume you have a serum, because they see how you heal and how you function, but they don’t know how you got it. They assume your story must be like Steve’s, if more clandestine. They don’t know your past. They don’t know that your broken pieces still fit together all wrong, sometimes more than others. They don’t know that you still punch walls, sometimes, because you feel something crawling over your ill-fitting skin. They don’t know that you look at Steve and Thor sometimes, because you don’t let them; but even if they did, they wouldn’t know why. They wouldn’t know that you haven’t aged a day since Clair brought you to SHIELD, several years ago, and that you think sometimes that you, Cap, and Thor will be the only ones left, in the end. You think missing Clair would hurt like hell.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

They don’t know, till they do, and all anyone has to do is google you.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

You’re surprised when they don’t blame you. You’re surprised when nothing changes, when they see the Black Widow for who he really is.

 

As you watch Sam get his poor, sad self roped into one of those drinking contests, Barnes looking like he doesn’t think he fits here—although he’s stopped hiding in his room—the sounds of contented conversation washing over you, you realize—

 

It’s because you aren’t just the Black Widow anymore.

 

“Hey, Anastasia, you getting in on this? My money’s on you,” Tony calls.

 

You laugh, and then you make your way over to the table.

 

 


End file.
